Museum Expansions That Think Inside the Footprint

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A photo rendering of a new gallery space designed by Frank Gehry for the Philadelphia Museum of Art.CreditGehry Partners for the Philadelphia Museum of Art

By Jane L. Levere

March 14, 2017

Seeking new audiences looking for novel ways to interact with art, museums big and small across the United States and Europe are remaking their existing footprints, creating new spaces for rapidly unfolding innovation in the art world.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art, for example — whose neo-Classical-style building dates to 1928 — is undergoing a transformation by Frank Gehry, creator of the Guggenheim Bilbao, which opened to great acclaim in Spain in 1997.

“There are so many vectors now,” Mr. Gehry said in an interview, describing the need for new kinds of space. “There’s art in the desert. There’s art in the skies. There’s computers; there’s sound; there’s light; there’s everything.”

“It’s not just painting on canvas,” he said. “It’s a big new world. Think of it as a stage set for whatever somebody’s going to come up with.”

His plan for the Philadelphia Museum features 78,000 new square feet of gallery space, including 55,000 square feet that will lie beneath its terrace, abutting the 72 stone steps made famous in the “Rocky” movies. It will be used to display special exhibitions and contemporary art.

The budget for what the museum is calling the “core project” is $196 million. This phase of the work is scheduled to be finished by 2020, while a so-called master plan will take a decade more to complete, at a cost as yet undetermined.

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A cross-section of the Royal Academy of Arts site in London, as it will appear in 2018.CreditDavid Chipperfield Architects

The Royal Academy of Arts in London, founded in 1768, has hired one of its own royal academicians, David Chipperfield, to devise a £50 million (about $62 million) plan to unite its existing home, Burlington House, on Piccadilly, with its nearby 1870s building at 6 Burlington Gardens, which opens onto a quieter street in Mayfair.

In New York, the American Museum of Natural History is working with Studio Gang Architects and the exhibition designers Ralph Appelbaum Associates on its new $340 million Gilder Center, which will be connected to 10 of the museum’s 25 buildings and extend into the surrounding park.

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A rendering of the proposed Gilder Center at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.CreditCourtesy of Ralph Appelbaum Associates

The Frick Collection is working on a new plan, after having met public resistance back in 2013 to a proposed renovation. That design would have eliminated its gated garden on the Upper East Side of Manhattan to accommodate a six-story addition. The new plan by Selldorf Architects, to be unveiled next year, will accommodate growth of the Frick’s collections, create new galleries and upgrade its conservation and research facilities, all within what the museum described as its “built footprint.”

Smaller museums are also following suit. In June, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago will complete a six-month $16 million renovation of its Josef Paul Kleihues building, to be overseen by Johnston Marklee. The goal of this plan is to convert 12,000 square feet in the museum into new public spaces — including a 4,000-square-foot restaurant with décor by the artist Chris Ofili.

In Miami, the Bass Museum, which occupies a landmark Art Deco public library, has been undergoing a $12 million renovation since 2015. It is scheduled to be finished in October. Created by the architects Arata Isozaki and David Gauld, who designed the museum’s first (2001) expansion, the new plan increases usable space by almost 50 percent, largely by eliminating a two-story ramp that connected its original building and a wing built in 2001.

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A rendering of the new exterior of the Bass Museum in Miami.CreditDavid Gauld Architect, via The Bass, Miami Beach

Upgraded educational facilities are important in all these projects. When the master plan of the Philadelphia Museum is completed, it will double the current space for education, largely through a new, state-of-the-art learning center.

One key feature of Mr. Chipperfield’s Royal Academy design is reconstruction of the original lecture theater at 6 Burlington Gardens, while the plan for the American Museum of Natural History involves either renovation or replacement of 75 percent of its classrooms. Similarly, the space devoted to education at the Bass will quintuple, to 5,000 square feet, while the Frick will build its first spaces and classrooms dedicated to that purpose.

Many of these institutions are also undoubtedly responding to changes in the reasons people visit museums. According to a survey released in 2015 by the National Endowment for the Arts, 73 percent of Americans say they attend cultural performances or museum exhibitions to socialize with friends and family, while 64 percent hope to learn new things, and 51 percent want to support their communities.

Speaking recently in New York, Madeleine Grynsztejn, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, said: “The pendulum has swung from the museum as passive temple to the museum as active space, from a treasure box to a toolbox. Today’s audiences are no longer looking for a cold ‘white cube’ museum experience. Instead, they crave warmer, shared experiences.”

To that end, her museum’s renovation includes a 2,000-square-foot commons on its second floor, created by the Mexican design studio Pedro y Juana. Ms. Grynsztejn described it as a “winter garden for all seasons,” one that will be a multiuse space for community activities and interactions with artists.

And Christopher Le Brun, a painter, royal academician and the academy’s president, said: “More and more of the public wants to engage with, encounter art and artists. They want to take part. Our spaces will make that easier for them.”

Arthur Cohen, chief executive of LaPlaca Cohen — a New York consulting firm that advises museums, including the Philadelphia Museum and the Frick, and other cultural institutions — suggested that museums were opting to grow within their own footprint now “because at this moment in time, the idea of a grand, flamboyant architectural gesture seems unseemly, quite tone-deaf.”

“What seems really true to the moment is understanding the role of the museum in its community and its world,” he said. “It’s not how you make it grand and showy. It’s how can you most fully activate the space that exists in a way that can engage audiences of today and tomorrow.”

Deborah Berke, dean of the Yale School of Architecture — whose endowed chairs have been held by Mr. Gehry, Mr. Chipperfield, Mr. Isozaki and Jeanne Gang — summed up the philosophical view spreading in the museum world.

“I think museum boards and museumgoers have become a little suspect about enormous sums of money being spent on new buildings, as opposed to collections or education,” she said. “The pendulum swinging away from new buildings is the result of several forces: what a museum is doing with its resources, and what is its responsibility to the larger community it serves.”